Following outrage from members of the theater community, all Broadway theaters will dim their lights in honor of Gavin Creel, as well as for Adrian Bailey and Dame Maggie Smith.
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The committee of Broadway theater owners also said they are also “reviewing their current dimming policy and procedures,” following the broader scrutiny on the process.
Creel, a Tony-Award winning actor and frequent Broadway performer, died Sept. 30 at the age of 48 following a recent cancer diagnosis. After his sudden passing, The Broadway League announced that select Broadway theaters, rather than all 41, would briefly dim their lights in his memory.
That decision was met with strong pushback from the Broadway community with Rachel Zegler, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra McDonald and many more posting on social media to call for a dimming of all theaters.
“He was a Tony award winner and had a 20+ years long career of inspiring his peers and the youth who aspired to be like him. [As] one of those youth, [I] feel like [I] can say this with my whole chest: why not all? this makes no sense,” Zegler wrote in an Instagram comment on a Playbill post about the initial light dimming.
Time Out Theater Critic Adam Feldman started an online petition , which received more than 20,000 signatures for a full dimming. And Actors’ Equity, the union for actors and stage managers, also stepped in, saying that a partial dimming should not be an option.
“Equity has reached out to The Broadway League to express our concerns about the practice of dimming the lights of only a few theaters in memory of those we’ve lost. Everyone who receives the tribute deserves the full tribute,” the union for actors and stage managers,” the union said in a social media post.
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Additional shows, including Moulin Rouge! , which is playing the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where Creel performed in the 2009 revival of Hair, also broke from the group after the announcement and said they would dim their lights.
The decision to dim the lights and on which theaters to dim is made by the nine Broadway theater owners, who are part of the Broadway League’s committee of theater owners. But the committee has not offered much insight into when all the lights are dimmed, as they were for Stephen Sondheim and James Earl Jones, versus a few, as they were initially for actors Marin Mazzie and Hinton Battle, until those decisions were also met with outrage by the community, leading to a full dimming, or not at all.
Broadway theaters were initially not going to dim the lights for Joan Rivers after her death in 2014 – a decision that was also met with blowback from the community and eventually reversed. When asked why they would not dim the lights, then Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin told The New York Times it came down to their ties to the community.
“Under our criteria people need to have been very active recently in the theater, or else be synonymous with Broadway – people who made their careers here, or kept it up,” St. Martin told the Times .
The committee of theater owners had not initially announced any light dimming for Bailey, a Broadway actor who died Sept. 27 at age 67 after roles in Sophisticated Ladies, Jelly’s Last Jam, Smokey Joe’s Café and The Little Mermaid , and Smith, who was a Tony Award winning actress and three-time nominee in addition to her onscreen roles and died Sept. 27 at age 89.
The lights for Bailey will be dimmed Oct. 17; the dimmings for Creel and Smith will be scheduled at a date in consultation with their families.
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